The elderly people who gathered for a recent protest at City Hall in San Francisco waved placards and chanted in English and Chinese, “We won’t go to a nursing home!”

Sitting in folding chairs or wheelchairs, surrounded by caregivers and relatives, the protesters cheered speakers who stood at the top of the City Hall steps and railed against the impending closing of adult day health care centers because of the California budget crisis.

More than 150 people, many of them too frail to stand, had gathered to protest the elimination of the centers, which serve about 35,000 elderly and disabled Californians, including 1,500 annually in San Francisco. The rally drew at least four mayoral candidates, including Mayor Ed Lee, who this week proposed to the Board of Supervisors that the city put $3.4 million toward keeping the centers open.

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Because of state budget cuts, California’s 274 adult day health care centers, including 10 in San Francisco and 23 more in Bay Area counties, are scheduled to lose their Medi-Cal financing and related federal matching funds at the end of November. One San Francisco center closed earlier this year and another one plans to shut in November.

The centers provide medical and therapeutic care. But they also stand as a bulwark against some of their clients’ greatest fears: being isolated at home by their disabilities or, worse, forced to move into institutions, losing their independence and daily contact with friends and family.

Deundra Hundon of Bayview stood at the top of the City Hall steps during the rally and addressed the crowd. Hundon’s mother, Sadie Fenley, 77, who has Alzheimer’s, stayed by her side as she spoke.

“If we didn’t have adult day health, can you imagine what her day would be like?” Hundon said. “Please don’t close adult day health care unless you want people like my mom to be home alone without friends or in a nursing home.”

The centers, located in stand-alone buildings or homes for the elderly, are a medical and social hub for their clients, many of whom have multiple chronic conditions like dementia, diabetes and depression. The programs, which qualified people covered by Medi-Cal attend free of charge, monitor and maintain the clients’ shaky health, helping them to continue to live in their homes, rather than in institutions. In San Francisco, almost half of the clients of the programs live alone.

“This is home away from home,” said Moli Steinert, executive director of SteppingStone, a nonprofit organization that runs four adult day health care centers in San Francisco. Steinert said that 60 of the 80 people at Golden Gate Adult Day Health Center in the Tenderloin District could end up institutionalized within six months if the center closed.

The state has been paying about $169 million annually to support the adult centers. Norman Williams, a spokesman for the California Department of Health Care Services, said the state would save money by using other means, like managed care plans, to pay for the medical services the centers have provided.

“Our transition plan is designed to provide the types of services that they need to remain independent in the community,” Williams said.

Still, the state expects that some clients will receive fewer medical services when the centers close, he said.

Disability Rights California, an advocacy group, has filed suit in federal court to try to halt the elimination of Medi-Cal financing for the centers. “If you eliminate this program without providing adequate alternative services that keep people in their own homes, that is a violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act,” said Elizabeth Zirker, a lawyer with Disability Rights California. A federal district court in Oakland will hold a hearing on the case on Nov. 8.